New Apostolic ChurchInternational

Current Word of the Month

February 2018: The experience of love

Young people who have never experienced any love in their lives—who were not loved as children, who had to grow up without the experience of a mother’s love, without a loving, sheltered parental home, who were only treated with coldness and disinterest—often become unstable personalities. They are easy prey for shady characters who promise them recognition and success, and thereby lead them away from the straight and narrow. When such young people then become delinquents, judges often make an unfavourable social prognosis—and the path to the margins of society seems all but carved into stone.

On the spiritual level we can often observe similar developments, namely when it comes to human beings who become more and more deeply entangled in sin because they have never felt the love of God. The path to the margins, to a condition of remoteness from God, and ultimately to eternal separation from God, seems inevitable. And that is where our mission begins: to recognise sinners as human beings who sin only because they have never felt the love of God. Let us give them some of our attention so that they may experience this love in their lives, and such that this experience of God’s love may ultimately lead to the desire for salvation and redemption, for liberation from the slavery of sin.

After all, one thing is certain: the stronger the experience of God’s love, the less formidable the inclination to sin.